Electronic devices, such as mobile phones and personal digital assistants (PDA's), often contain firmware and application software that are either provided by the manufacturers of the electronic devices, by telecommunication carriers, or by third parties. These firmware and application software often contain software bugs and a device management (DM) server often facilitates bug fixing operations. It is often not clear who should pay for the ensuing data traffic. It is also not clear how a carrier network can support different billing models when it comes to data traffic due to device management activities.
Differencing algorithms are typically used in a generator that is employed to create update packages for updating firmware and software in devices, to generate difference information that are packaged in update packages. For several reasons, it is desirable for update packages to be small. Unfortunately, there is only so much that can be done by differencing algorithms used in present-day generators. There is a problem of getting the update packages to be small when the differencing algorithms, and generators in general, cannot make them any smaller or any more compact.
Quite often, the manufacturer of an electronic device modifies the order in which software components are organized in the non-volatile memory of the device. When this happens, differencing engines create update packages that are very large, because the apparent changes between one version and another seem exaggerated due to movements of software components in the software image of the device. Such exaggerated differences between one version of a build image of an electronic device and another version due to movements of software components makes update packages larger and download time longer. It is often difficult to compress an update package into a manageable size. The same compression problem is encountered in the generation of new update packages from a pair of old and new firmware versions.
Further limitations and disadvantages of conventional and traditional approaches will become apparent to one of skill in the art, through comparison of such systems with some aspects of the present invention as set forth in the remainder of the present application with reference to the drawings.